As
any connoisseur of bad cinema can tell you, there are "bad"
movies and then there are BAD movies. It's virtually impossible to
explain to anyone who doesn't understand why people waste their time
watching something they know in advance is going to be horrible but
simply put, not all turkeys are created equal. Basically, there
seems to be an inverse proportion between a bad movie's budget and
how big a cult it's able to develop.

On one end of the spectrum, you have your low-to-no budget flicks. I
think we're all familiar with these. These are the sort of movies
where the budget is about equal to a couple packs of chewing gum and
a box of paper clips and the director may well have found a better
use for his money by spending it on those items. This is the domain
of the Ed Woods, the Al Adamsons, and the Andy Milligans. These
movies are easy to love because the passion and energy the cast and
crew put into these things is palpable, even when the talent is not.
With movies like these, it seems a miracle that the film even got
loaded into the camera correctly. These filmmakers may have tried
and failed but by God they tried their damndest! And failed
spectacularly!

At the other extreme are would-be blockbusters with big names, big
budgets and, more often than not, big egos. If the low-budget movies
are often loved more than their accomplishments merit, their
big-budget brethren can be reviled more than their offenses deserve.
In cases like these, it feels unforgivable that so much talent and
money should be wasted on a product so inferior. Every so often a
hearty soul will speak up in defense of one of these stinkers, but
they're usually shouted down before anything like a cult is given a
chance to grow. Something like Plan 9
From Outer Space can play at a revival house to a packed
and appreciative crowd, but you won't see the same thing happening
with say, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Every so often a big-budget misfire will develop a low-budget-style
cult. Showgirls is an obvious
example and I even know folks who will admit to being unable to turn
away from Howard the Duck. But
in these instances, the movies are so completely out of whack with
anything even remotely resembling a regular motion picture, all the
audience can do is sit there dumbfounded and mutter, "What were
they thinking?"

There is, however, one thing that both the low and big budget fiasco
shares in common. Seemingly overnight, they become known as Bad
Movies. And once a movie is tagged that way, it's all over. It will
never ever be known as anything other than a Bad Movie. For example:

"Hey look. Ishtar's on."

"Oh, man. That's a Bad Movie."

"Have you seen it?"

"Well, no, but it's a Bad Movie."

For the record, I happen to think that Ishtar
is not that bad a movie. It's a dumb comedy, sure, but I got more
laughs out of it than I got out of Adam Sandler's
Mr. Deeds, that's for sure.
The point is that once a movie becomes known as a Bad Movie, it's
well nigh unto impossible to see it as anything but. The only reason
to watch it at all is to see how bad it really is. If you can sit
down to watch Gigli with an
open mind and not ready to prejudge it as a Bad Movie, then I want
you on my jury if I'm ever arrested for murdering Bill Hunt because
he decided to be funny and send me Gigli
to review.

That said, let's take a look at two Bad Movies recently released to
DVD. One is a classic low-budget Bad Movie, frequently named one of
the worst movies ever made (high praise indeed). The other belongs
to that more elite school of Bad Movies, the big budget
schlock-a-thon where nothing goes right.

My
first exposure to the splendor and majesty of Attack
of the Killer Tomatoes came, as I'm sure it did for a lot
of people, in Harry and Michael Medved's book The
Golden Turkey Awards. AKT
was nominated for Worst Vegetable Movie, an honor it lost to the
probably more-deserving Attack of the
Mushroom People. Nevertheless, AKT
stuck in my head and I quickly tracked it down. After watching it, I
was surprised and a little disappointed to discover that this was a
movie that was trying to be bad. Director John DeBello and his
partners in crime had made an affectionate parody of the giant
monster movies of the 1950's. In my mind, this should have
disqualified it from consideration in the Golden Turkey Awards. To
be a truly Bad Movie, the filmmakers need to genuinely believe that
somebody somewhere is going to be frightened by the titular
creatures, be they Killer Tomatoes, Mushroom People, or Giant
Leeches. In AKT, that's not
even a consideration.

Now of course it's possible for a comedy to be a Bad Movie, but that
would simply mean that the movie just wasn't funny. And while
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
isn't a parody in the same league as Young
Frankenstein, it is often a lot funnier than it probably
should be. The opening credits and theme song? Pretty funny. The
poorly dubbed Japanese scientist? Pretty funny. The inexplicably
popular "Puberty Love" song? Very funny. Sure, it goes on
way too long and a lot of the jokes fall flat but on the whole,
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
is charming and easy to take. It's as stupid a movie as you're ever
likely to see but sometimes there's nothing wrong with a little
stupidity. If Airplane! (which
AKT actually predates) is the
MAD Magazine of movie
comedies, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
is Cracked. The way I see it,
any movie that ends with hundreds of oddballs (including the San
Diego Chicken!) smooshing a parking lot full of tomatoes with their
feet at least has its heart in the right place.

One big reason that Attack of the Killer
Tomatoes is still considered a Bad Movie seems to be
simply because it was a Cheap Movie. While filming, the production
garnered a little notoriety due to a helicopter accident involving
the movie's biggest star, Jack Riley (if you're asking who the hell
is Jack Riley right now, you're probably too young to remember the
old Bob Newhart Show. Trust
me, he was very funny on it). Nobody was seriously hurt in the crash
and, like any good guerilla filmmaker, DeBello used the footage of
the chopper going down in the finished movie. For some, this kind of
thing makes AKT a Bad Movie.
Personally, I think it's ingenious. The crash remains a highlight of
the film, made even funnier by the fact that it seems so totally
arbitrary.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
has been brought to DVD by those pop culture archeologists over at
Rhino in two forms: a bare-bones edition for the merely curious and
a full-fledged collector's edition in a custom box for the true
Tomato lover. The video has been cropped to full-frame only, which
is unfortunate but when you realize that most people probably saw
this on TV in the first place, it could almost be considered its
original theatrical ratio. Regardless, AKT
is hardly a great-looking movie and it doesn't appear that too much
visual information has been lost. The transfer is adequate,
capturing the puke greens and baby blues of the 70's sets, locations
and wardrobes in all their hideous glory. There are a few trouble
spots, most often when heavy patterns emerge on walls or jackets but
for the most part, it'll do. Sound quality is about the same,
meaning it's not really that great but it gets the job done. No
doubt if this disc had been in Anchor Bay's hands, we'd all be
singing along to a DTS 6.1 remix of "Puberty Love". That
would have been amusing for about 20 seconds. If nothing else, the
mono track provided by Rhino never lets you forget you're watching a
low-budget 70's flick.

For the special collector's edition, Rhino has put together a
collection of extras worthy of any cult movie. Kicking things off is
an audio commentary by the three guys who came up with all this
nonsense: director John DeBello, actor Steve "Rock" Peace,
and Costa Dillon, whose idea it was in the first place and seemingly
did everything else on the project (all three are credited with the
screenplay). This is a fun, laid-back track with plenty of amusing
low-budget horror stories. None of them take themselves or the movie
too seriously and are completely at ease with the fact that whatever
fame it may have is thanks to its reputation as one of the worst
movies of all time.

Also included on the disc is a "Tomato Mode" enhanced
viewing option. You know the drill. Little icons appear from time to
time and pressing "enter" takes you out of the movie and
into a variety of clips, interviews, and the like. Sometimes you're
taken to a corresponding scene in the original 8mm version of
AKT, which is included in its
entirety elsewhere. Other bonuses are only accessible in "Tomato
Mode", including a few random comments from John Astin, who
starred in every Killer Tomato
movie except for this one.

Any questions about AKT that
may be unanswered after all this are surely addressed in the half a
dozen or so featurettes on the disc. Legacy
of a Legend is a basic overview of all things Tomato.
Crash & Burn goes into
detail about the aforementioned helicopter accident and includes
local news footage of the incident and clips of Johnny Carson
interviewing Jack Riley on The Tonight
Show. Where Are They Now?
is pretty self-explanatory, though its done in such a
tongue-in-cheek style you're not really sure what to believe (yes,
Steve Peace really did turn to politics after Attack
of the Killer Tomatoes hey, if Schwarzenegger can
become governor, then Wilbur Finletter can be a senator). And
Slated for Success shows us
whatever happened to the slate girl on AKT.
Necessary information? Nope, but kind of amusing anyway.

On the negative half of the equation are a handful of gag
featurettes that are neither informative nor particularly funny.
Famous Fowl turns the
spotlight on the San Diego Chicken for a couple of minutes but does
nothing to explain how he turned up in the movie.
Killer Tomatomania feels like
something that would run on E!, as a fabulous babe correspondent
(who admits she's never even seen AKT)
and some dude in a tomato costume annoy people outside of the
Hollywood and Highland complex in LA. Finally, We
Told You So! attempts to show how Attack
of the Killer Tomatoes is in fact an H.G. Wells-ish piece
of prophetic science fiction. Hardy-har-har.

Rounding out this overstuffed tomato is a pair of 8mm films from the
creators of AKT. The original
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
short film is here with an optional commentary by DeBello, Peace,
and Dillon. We also get to see Gone with
the Babusuland, a short version of the proposed
feature-length epic Do They Accept
Traveler's Checks in Babusuland. Commentary runs on this
one whether you want it to or not, but since it's a silent film, it
doesn't interfere all that much. Three brief deleted scenes from
AKT are here, also with
mandatory commentary by John DeBello. You also get the theatrical
trailer, two radio spots, a gag "Production Design"
gallery, sing-along segments for the AKT
tunes, a gallery of props and other stuff, and a pointless trivia
game. The game isn't really much of a game, since it isn't
interactive and doesn't tell you anything that isn't found elsewhere
on the disc. Finally, there's a couple of Easter Eggs (Easter
Tomatoes?) hidden for your viewing pleasure, one of which features
my old buddy Lloyd "President of Troma Studios and creator of
the Toxic Avenger" Kaufman.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
isn't a great movie. Hell, I don't think it's even a great Bad
Movie. But it has a rabid fan base (and you know who you are) that
should be more than satisfied with this package. If you're a "Weird
Al" fan, you'll probably get a kick and half out of
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

On
the other hand, I don't know who or what you'd have to be a fan of
to get even one-eighth of a kick out of Lawrence Kasdan's
Dreamcatcher, based on the
novel by Stephen King. King is no stranger to Bad Movie territory.
In their quest to bring every syllable King has ever written to the
screen, filmmakers have botched the job a lot more often than
they've gotten it right. Even King himself has churned out a Bad
Stephen King Movie, the hopelessly ridiculous Maximum
Overdrive. But most Bad King Movies have a solid
foundation made entirely of cheese. Children
of the Corn, The Lawnmower Man,
Creepshow 2. None of these are good movies but at least
they're bad in a goofy, low-budget kind of way. Now that King is
being taken seriously as a novelist, we've seen the rise of
something far more frightening than anything to slither out of his
imagination: the pretentious and ponderous Bad Stephen King Movie.
While pieces of this new creature have been lurking around for
awhile now, everything first truly came together in Scott Hicks'
tedious Hearts in Atlantis.
Dreamcatcher is the next step
in its evolution.

While Dreamcatcher is in fact
one of the few King books I haven't read, I have been assured that
the novel is much, much better than the adaptation. The basic story
is this. Four friends form an unbreakable bond when, as boys, they
come to the rescue of a mentally challenged kid named Duddits.
Somehow, Duddits gives them a psychic bond and a few additional
goodies, like the ability to read minds and create a swirly vortex
thing in the air that points out lost keys, children, and what have
you. Think Stand by Me meets
The Fantastic Four. The kids
grow up and become Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, and Timothy
Olyphant. Lewis is hit by a car and almost dies. After he
recuperates, the four buddies head up to their hunting cabin in the
middle of Nowhere, Maine. And that's when the craziness starts,
involving Alien-like space monsters that blast out your ass, creepy
signs of a virulently contagious virus, and a highly classified
military group led by the certifiably nuts Morgan Freeman whose job
it is to contain this whole thing. Think The
Stand meets The Tommyknockers.

For a little while, Dreamcatcher
almost fools you into thinking it might salvage itself into kind of
a neat little movie. There are individual moments of weirdness,
including the rescue of a lost hunter and a mass exodus of animals
the hell out of the E.T.-infested forest that, if they had been
combined and resolved properly, would have been downright nifty. It
reminded me ever so briefly of one of those John Wyndham adaptations
like Village of the Damned or
The Day of the Triffids, in
which a number of creepy but seemingly unrelated incidents come
together to form a potentially apocalyptic scenario. And I'd like to
think that maybe that could have happened with Dreamcatcher
in someone else's hands.

Unfortunately, Dreamcatcher
was in Lawrence Kasdan's hands and much of the movie's failure rests
squarely on his shoulders. Kasdan makes no effort to disguise the
flashback sequences' thematic similarity to Stand
by Me. In fact, the only real difference is the quality
of the child actors involved. Imagine if instead of casting kids
like River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton, Rob Reiner had just grabbed the
first four kids he saw on the street. And despite his credits as a
screenwriter on such thrill rides as Raiders
of the Lost Ark and The Empire
Strikes Back, Kasdan seems to have no idea how to
approach a horror movie. The film is chockful of plot holes and
logical inconsistencies. If the four guys share a psychic link, how
come they don't immediately know when one of them has been
slaughtered by an alien? In the entire history of Bad Choices Made
by Future Monster Victims, there are few stupider than Jason Lee's
decision to risk his life for an out-of-reach toothpick. And the
less said about the thrilling conclusion, the better.

While Dreamcatcher is every
inch a Bad Stephen King Movie, it's a fairly decent DVD. It looks
terrific, even though the predominant color scheme is white, a
difficult shade to capture digitally. The widescreen picture is
anamorphically enhanced and the image has a nice clarity of detail
to it. The sound is equally impressive, with monster hisses and
helicopter invasions swirling around dramatically.

The extras are just OK, primarily consisting of a trio of
featurettes. Stephen King himself talks about the novel and the
circumstances surrounding its writing in DreamWriter,
the most interesting of the three. Clocking in at a little over
seven minutes, it's not particularly in-depth but its worth checking
out for King fans. DreamMakers
interviews Kasdan and the crew, while DreamWeavers
focuses on the visual effects. Both of these latter two featurettes
serve to try to convince us that the movie we've just suffered
through is actually pretty good. They do not succeed in reaching
that objective.

Apart from these, the only other substantial extra is a series of "lifted"
scenes. I guess they're not called "deleted" scenes so
that we won't wonder why the rest of the movie wasn't just deleted
as well. None of these add a single iota of interesting material to
the finished film, except for a gag scene that at least proves that
Thomas Jane, Donnie Wahlberg, and Tom Sizemore have a sense of
humor. The original ending is also included and it's only marginally
stupider than the one they ended up with. Rounding things out are
the teaser trailer (which prophetically ends with Freeman intoning,
"I'll show you things you wish you'd never seen") and a
page of cast and crew information.

There are a lot of reasons why filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and
David Cronenberg never stray too far from the horror genre but one
of the biggest is simply that they understand it and they're good at
it. Far too often, "respectable" directors fall flat on
their face when they try to get their hands dirty in the genre.
Kenneth Branagh couldn't make a go of it with his version of
Frankenstein. Stephen Frears
failed miserably with his Jekyll-and-Hyde variation,
Mary Reilly. And now Lawrence
Kasdan joins the crew with one of the worst Stephen King adaptations
to date. Filmmakers everywhere, I beseech you. If you're going to
make a Bad King Movie, make it fast and make it cheap. I would much
rather chuckle through 90 minutes of Maximum
Overdrive than sleep through two-plus hours of
Dreamcatcher any day of the
week.